Wot I Think: Rogue Warrior

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The development of Rogue Warrior has been tumultuous. Beginning with Zombie Studios, publishers Bethesda weren’t satisfied with what they were making and took it away from them, scrapped it, and gave it to AvP developers Rebellion to have a go. It’s out, and let’s not pretend no one’s noticed, it’s getting one of the biggest kickings ever. But hey, how about me? Wot will I think?

Well, I’m astonished. I wasn’t going in blind. I’d seen the grim-toned FPS running at E3 and it didn’t seem likely that another six months would be able to fix something so obviously awful. And while I’ve not read any other reviews, I did accidentally stumble on this list of review scores on the official forums when searching for some manner of technical support. And yet even so, astonished.

The premise: The supposed life of Richard “Demo Dick” Marcinko captured in videogame form, as you stomp through North Korea and Russia on a one-man mission to destroy their anti-nuke system. The reality: One of the most dreary, unambitious, unimaginative and miserable shooters ever made.

Most astonishing is the length. And I’m conscious that I’m in danger of enacting the opening monologue to Annie Hall when I say this.

It’s two and a half hours long. When I read reviews claiming a game only lasts so many hours I tend to be slightly cynical – yeah sure, Mr Bravado Pants, you and whose cheat code? But trust me, I timed it. Rogue Warrior is two and a half hours long.

It’s two and a half hours of walking along metal platforms and grey corridors, shooting the same enemies (I think there may have been two types – one without a welding mask, one with – but it was dark) over and over and over, without a moment of variety, deviation or challenge. There’s maybe seven or eight guns you can choose from, almost infinite amounts of ammo, and a health system that has you switching from death’s door to perfect health and back again in seconds.

The gimmick is the combination of Marcinko’s unlikely life and Mickey Rourke providing his voice. Marcinko is, apparently, fond of swearing. He likes to say things like “goat fucker”, while detailing how he killed a foreign gentleman with a knife. So to celebrate this Rogue Warrior has the suddenly-in-vogue Rourke shouting “goat fucker” while you kill foreign gentlemen with a knife. The knife, of course, is not available as a wielded weapon, but only appears when you do a kill move. These are achieved by walking up behind an enemy and pressing E. This then cuts to one of a couple of dozen near-identical sequences in which your bearded wanker of an avatar stabs the enemy in the face, or back, or both, or maybe snaps his neck. It’s context sensitive to the slightest degree. If they’re near an edge, you’ll throw them over it. That’s about it.

These kill moves are all the game has. And they’re something a dozen other games have done before, and far better. Perhaps most notably Volition’s mediocre The Punisher, where they were unique to the situation and enormously more gruesome. Here, while poorly rendered blood spurts out, no wound is created, no real gore occurs. It’s cheap, lazy, and somewhat unpleasant.

The range of weapons is just plain strange. Despite a number of models, everything is pretty much the same to use, other than the silenced pistol (useless) and one slightly meatier weapon (least available). And they all feel a lot less like firing bullets out of a gun, and a lot more like spilling soup out of a sock. Headshots appear to do nothing special, enemies taking a random number of hits to go down no matter where you aim. Some will fall dead when you clip a limb, others will survive long sprays of machine gun fire to the face and chest.

And there’s literally nothing else to do. You only shoot at the enemies, then run into the next miserable room. There’s not a puzzle, a scripted sequence, hell, even a train ride (despite many trains in the area) – just a tedious, yet short-lived, row of shooting galleries. And even this is hilariously inept. Each of the tiny missions begins with every enemy comically stood facing away from you so you can be sure to do some kill moves. Maybe they’re fixing machines, or staring blankly at the nothing in front of them, apparently deaf to your clanging arrival. Then about a third of the way in to each level they’re all now facing your way and it’s gun time. None are surprised by your arrival, none are idling, simply existing to already be shooting at you when you open a door or turn a corner.

So my favourite moment of the game came before I’d updated my graphics drivers. Without the latest set it caused items in the game world to be randomly replaced by others – for example, an enemy’s head being replaced by a concrete bench. Or a dying man’s hat growing into a lamp post. That was, by a stretch, the most entertaining thing that happened in the half an afternoon spent with this nonsense. Once this was fixed, however, the rest of the failures become more apparent.

Despite running an engine that looks a good five years out of date (although I should stress, far better on PC than the 360 code shown at E3, that looked like early generation PS2), it can’t cope. There’s no anti-aliasing or V-syncing, ensuring it’s doubly dreadful, tearing and jagged throughout. And from my tech support investigations it appears I am far from the only one to find that it staggers literally every second. As you walk in a straight line you can count the beat as it hesitates. I grew used to it, in the same way you grow used to tinnitus. I.e. You’re damned grateful when it goes away.

Something else I’m grateful has gone away is the swearing. You might imagine it to be a redeeming feature, having Rourke grumble angry insanity as you play. But there’s only so many times you need to hear “Goddamn dick-breath Commie motherfuckers” before it would be quite nice to engage in some civilised communication. Gaming Tourrettes proves quickly tiresome. In fact, it begins tiresome, with the difficulty levels described as follows:

But maybe some sympathy is deserved. If this game is a faithful recreation of Marcinko’s life, then he’s been tragically afflicted with the inability to jump or step over things. Imagine what life must be like for him, forced to take enormous detours on his journeys if there’s so much as a piece of pipe lying on the ground.

A few others bits and pieces. There’s no mouse for the menus – why would there be! There’s no saving, just a poor checkpoint system (that the game warns you will be saving to your machine’s hard drive, is that okay?). On-screen instructions reference the 360 controller (my favourite moment was when being told how to use cover (something you never need to do) in which it instructed me to use the keyboard key I’d assigned to enter cover, and to pull the “left stick” back to leave it).

I’ve played worse shooters. Really, I have. The enemy AI may be rubbish (they tend to either do the jack-in-the-box popping up and down in the same spot, or funnier, just run away for ages), but at least they don’t run into walls or have always-perfect aims. And there’s no boss fights. But it’s just so phenomenally uninspired, so completely free of creativity, and so terribly executed. And most of all, and I can’t stress this enough, IT COSTS THIRTY POUNDS.

The gall to release a game this bad is one thing. To charge full price for something that is less than three hours long is unacceptable. There’s multiplayer, sure. But good grief, why would anyone even think to bother? It turns out they wouldn’t. Nearly two weeks after release and there was not a single other player online in the world when I tried.

It’s really tragic when you read what the game would have been, a few years ago when it was announced – it was an open world (set in north korea), squad based sabotage/shootout/sneakyness TPS. With a SWAT4 style command interface for your dudes.

Bethesda – “Hey Rebellion, you wanna make this Rogue Warrior game for us?”
Rebellion – “Our hands are pretty full with AvP right now, we can barely spare the cleaner.”
B – “But, you can spare the cleaner?”
R – “Err….”
B – “Here’s a few hundred thousand pounds”
R – “Done.”

Didn’t you get the hint from the name? ZOMBIE STUDIOS. I tend to look for something more technical than harsh gasping moans, staggering lunges for sweet human flesh, and the gentle tearing of decaying flesh from developers of high-budget games.

Bethesda have always been a publisher. Back before morrowind/oblivion suddenly seemed to make them household names they used to publish loads of games (almost all terrible) and even make FPS and Racing games.

I remember Echelon (poor space/ground shooter) and Sea Dogs (ok 3d Pirates style game) and several others too poor to mention. Not sure Bethesda has ever published a really good 3rd party game though.

Umm, that sounds so atrociously bad I almost want to pick it up as a lark… but only if I can guarantee those graphical glitches. Something is just borderline awesome about shooting North Koreans with cement benches for heads.

“Rogue Warrior is a character-driven, first-person-shooter, featuring Richard ‘Demo Dick’ Marcinko’s explosive personality in an action-packed single player campaign, and intense multiplayer combat.”

Going by John’s review the only true bits of that are the punctuation marks. Since I’d never heard of this explosive personality I followed the wiki link. From which it appears stealing nukes from Russia and N. Korea was exactly what he didn’t do. Would have been far more interesting if they’d made a (proper) game from something he did get up to, penetration tests of US nuclear subs and bases, Air Force One etc. There haven’t been many violence free stealth-em-ups recently – well nearly violence free, apparently he allowed himself a bit of mild torture to get launch codes from some hapless conscripts.

Hrmph, I understand it’s terrible, but I’m a fan of it being cool to poo-poo bad games, surely a big DONT BUY THIS sign would suffice? I enjoy your writing, but I’d rather read about something I might buy.

Still, I guess they are going on people buying it to see how bad it is/think it sounds cool and are caught out

Very well done John. I’m stunned you even took the time to write this after having played the game. If I were you I’d just have thrown the CD out the window or deleted off my computer if you didn’t get a CD copy. I would have never thought of it again, I’d never even tell anyone else I played it and just wait for it to go away. Very brave of you to write this indeed, thanks for letting us know so we don’t have to go through the same horrible mess you did to find out how bad the game is :)

The concept has a lot of potential and the execution is shit. Not to mention the fucking ridiculous $50 price tag for a three hour (at best) game. Who are these idiot developers and publishers setting these absurd value/entertainment to price ratios these days? Shit like this *deserves* to be “pirated”, except that it sucks so god damn much that nobody would even want to wast of time to do *that*.

Fuck, for $50, you could buy all of the books in the series an still have enough money left over for a fucking steak dinner for yourself and some other cocksucker.

The object replacement bug reminds me of an evening perhaps seven years ago in Mafia. Somehow, everyone in the city had their heads replaced with that of a dog. Everything else was normal. This only happened once. I took a screenshot or two but I’ve since misplaced them. A shame.

I had a great bug in GTA: San Andreas where all the buildings became bizarre, cubist piles of jagged polygonal madness, with monsterous palm trees spewing out shattered fronds onto roads zooming off into the sky. The helicopter I was flying was a constantly shifting collection of sharp-edged blocks. It was great, and I do have the screenshots somewhere…

After alt-tabbing one too many times out of the Witcher, I returned to find Geralt’s face twisted and stretched into a horrible, wailing apparition from the nether regions of hell.
Subsequently a sword sprang into existence above his head and started wanging around for no reason.
Really odd. Quite funny at first, until you look into his eyes and feel the cold stare of death itself.

Hah! I had a similar WItcher bug a while back, the sword didn’t float around him but his face was messed up. I forget what caused it, it wasn’t from alt tabbing out. I think I had a corrupted install or something. Not sure, it was a while ago. Hellface Gerault should be an unlockable or something.

I had a witcher bug where in the middle of a conversation the character I was talking to’s head would dissapear, except for their teeth and eyes. That was bloody weird. Oh and once I talked to a man with wood instead of skin.

There was a fantastic bug in my first install of GTA4 where part of the city was, well, just gone. Bridges ended in mid-air, and you could see vehicles driving into the void, and the distant screams of pedestrians as they fell in. When I posted about the bug on the official support forum, noone would believe me, even when I post videos, insisting I was making it up!

See, this is why it annoys me when people trash ambitious-but-flawed games like Mirror’s Edge and Far Cry 2 with “worst game of the year” or “worst game ever” (seriously!). We are lucky that reviewers like John play games like Rogue Warrior so we don’t have to.

I have seen Battlefield Earth, Troll 2, and Manos: The Hands of Fate. Also Batman and Robin, and a few other such cinematic horrors. (All with Rifftrax or MST3K riffing – I’m not actively insane, although said movies can’t have helped that.) That said, I think Transformers 2 fits comfortably in that company – it’s not as bad as Troll 2 or Manos, but on the other hand, those are sort of endearingly incompetent. Transformers 2 is actively offensive in most of the ways a PG-13 movie can be. And worst of all, unlike any of the above (except maybe Batman and Robin, dunno figures on that one) – it is and has been tremendously financially successful.

Sounds like a clever(replace clever with lame) con. Its sad that theres tons of indie devs making way better games that cant get theres recognised or released. In fact its an insult that an official developer can release and expect people to buy something like this.

The most terrifying thing is “Beginning with Zombie Studios, publishers Bethesda weren’t satisfied with what they were making and took it away from them, scrapped it, and gave it to AvP developers Rebellion to have a go.”

Why are Rebellion so schizophrenic?! They knock out name-making stuff like AVP and Rogue Trooper and then turn around and produce rubbish like Gunlok and this tripe. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a studio more confused about what they want to be.

Oy, Rebellion! Either get on with turning out the sorts of games that gain you a following no matter what subject matter you decide to explore (I’m looking at your woefully under used 2000ad IP) , or swallow the cold vomit and stick to this sort of do-it-with-your-eyes-closed, for hire, crap.

Daikatana was at least an imaginative design. A poorly executed design, which ignored every revolutionary thing that happened between it’s release and Quake 1. An over-ambitious design which was unable to integrate the RPG elements properly (the way Bioshock did later) or have sufficiently awesome companion bots (the way Left4Dead did later). But you could tell that Romero was genuinely trying hard to make it awesome.

Rogue Warrior is more like Limbo of the Lost than Daikatana. A pathetically conceived, lazily hacked together game whose producers either deliberately want to rip people off or are completely deluded as to the current quality standards of the market.

Well to be fair LotL wasn’t the developer’s fault. They were just three guys in a pub who out sourced there artwork and got scammed. I’m fairly certain their only failure was in the budget and inexperience. But a game this bad from a veteran developer with a big enough budget to hire Mickey on the other hand has no such excuse.

They didn’t outsource anything. The main force of the three guys was just taking screenshots of all kinds of games and used them as backgrounds. Yes, he was just insane like that. He also registered on various sites, pretending to be a fan of the game and talked positively of it. He scolded someone for releasing a walkthrough of this shitfest. Because yeah, everyone should figure out themselves that if you combine water and a yellow fluid you get some green fluid. And all the insane pixelhunts…
He’s just not right in the head, that’s all.
You shouldn’t blame the publisher maybe, but you can blame the developers.

I love the lamp-post head bug. Really, it’s that sort of bug that I could deal with seeing more often. Merely crashing to desktop or being unable to progress is unpleasant. Seeing NPCs casually float off into the air or develop inanimate objects for body parts, much better.

Only played Operation Anchorage once. When I did, the breathtaking mountain vista you’re presented with at the beginning was somewhat ruined by the hundreds of flying trees in the distance. Although the trees seemed to follow the contours of the land, they were doing it about a hundred feet in the air.

Here’s a hot topic that will likely spark some sort of discussion and discourse that is mildly related to Rogue Warrior, but not enough that we actually have to talk about it, thank goodness. A noble derailing, if you will, because we all know we don’t want to talk about it, John’s probably weeping into a pillow somewhere with a copy of the collected works of Shakespeare clutched to his breast after having to review this churlish, asinine little thing of a game.

So yes, in the spirit of won’t somebody please think of the reviewers, let’s talk about something other than Rogue Warrior.

Here we go, leaving Rogue Warrior far behind now…

Topic: When was the last time you saw swearing used so well in a game’s dialogue that it actually enhanced the proceedings, rather than diluting the joy of mildly intelligent conversation?

I haven’t played Brothers in Arms, so I can’t say about that, but I have to agree with Taillefer about The Longest Journey, but the dialogue in that game was top notch across the board.

There are so many great things to be said about The Longest Journey though, such as it having one of the most earnestly warm and witty female leads to be found in gaming, a leading lady who’s both strong and natural. The only other that’s come close is Jade, and Jade was wonderful too. So many female leads are sex objects, even in recent years, just as so many males are steroidal idiots, but that’s a topic — about how we seem to be inching ever further toward some worryingly anti-intellectual age by the day — for another time.

As for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, again, I feel that Troika had some really clever people working on their scripts, and it was only benefited by the use of a variant of the Source engine, I know Valve screwed them over a bit, but without the Source engine the characters wouldn’t have been half as emotive, which is a key feature of that engine. And the emotive nature of the characters was very much part and parcel of why the dialogue flowed so naturally, even with swearing.

Whereas in some games, you’ll have some steroidal idiot just stand there and deliver a line like “Yo, les’ dance, m’fuckers!” or what have you, and not move a muscle, not twitch, not raise an eyebrow, or give any kind of indication that there’s anything there other than an automaton, and really the voice acting might then as well be monotone, or spoken by Microsoft Sam.

VTMB (because I really can’t be arsed to type that out again, you’ll understand) benefits from having a cast capable of body language, they don’t just verbally swear, they emotively swear, and that’s what makes it seem so natural. To the keen observer, the body speaks volumes when someone is agitated, and all of us pick it up on a subconscious level.

Jack’s beard wouldn’t have been so hypnotic if he hadn’t had the peculiar habit of rocking his head unnervingly from side to side as he spoke.

So in regards to The Longest Journey, the swearing is swallowed up by the more intellectual nature of it all, and if a person swears it’s usually a reactionary thing, it isn’t swearing for the sake of it, and it adds to the more intelligent airs of the characters in that game, as a rear swear can have more impact than no swearing at all, for it says that yes, it’s an adult game and people could be swearing with every other word, but the characters involved are a little more restrained than that.

Not a PC game, but I got to throw in House of the Dead: Overkill for the Wii. That game nailed the atmosphere of cheap 70’s exploitation horror flicks, and the dialog would never have worked if it weren’t strewn with expletives.

If you have a Wii and don’t mind light-gun shooters, rent it or buy it cheap. An excellent four or so hours of fun. Just don’t let any kids listen to it.

Jad speaks the truth. HOTD: Overkill holds the record for most swearing in a videogame script ever, and yet this doesn’t harm it. In fact, it’s just one of the many running gags in the remarkably funny script.

Even Edge liked the sweariosity.

And here is a video of the entire game abridged into four minutes. It makes ME laugh, at least!

I believe the publisher and development staff should keep a watch over their collective shoulder’s for Mr. Marcinko paying them a surprise visit in the middle of the night.. Cripe I’d be pissed as all get out over this one if they portrayed me that way..

I completed this lovely game last week, I don’t recall playing it as I fell out of a daze once completing it. I do remember running into a spot with an enemy and he popped out of existence I looked around in the game for a good minute in estonishment of what had just happened. I did question my mental faculties at first, but then Mickey Rouke swore some more and everything was okay.

Bethesda have always been a publisher. Back before morrowind/oblivion suddenly seemed to make them household names they used to publish loads of games (almost all terrible) and even make FPS and Racing games.

I remember Echelon (poor space/ground shooter) and Sea Dogs (ok 3d Pirates style game) and several others too poor to mention. Not sure Bethesda has ever published a really good 3rd party game though.

haha lol@the end credit rap
I´ve read two of his (Richard Marcinko´s) books, his autobiography, about Vietnam, starting the seal teams, and post war operations: “Rogue Warrior” is pretty good reading.
After that he got a court verdict (was revealing to much military info?) that hey may never again write a non-fiction book.
I also read one of his fiction books, “Red Cell”- it was a Tom Clancy-esque action novel a bit more detailed than usual, but less well written than the Tom Clancy stuff.
I might read his book on business management sometime (no joke).

It is strange (or not?) that it is on Steam. Valve claim that they hand-pick the games that they’ll publish, based on the game’s quality and originality. Looks like this one has neither. Just a big name, but that shouldn’t be enough for hand-picking it.

If their definition of hand picked was ‘what ever the hell we think will sell’, then I’d believe it.
Even this monstrosity will probably make Valve some money. More than it will for the developers probably.

Anonymous Coward said:
It is strange (or not?) that it is on Steam. Valve claim that they hand-pick the games that they’ll publish, based on the game’s quality and originality. Looks like this one has neither. Just a big name, but that shouldn’t be enough for hand-picking it.

That’s the biggest line of bullshit I’ve ever heard. If they really hand-pick the games, then how do they explain Iron Man, Ducati World Championship, Damnation, Dreamkiller, or any of the countless other mediocre-to-awful games on Steam?

Ooops. It’s only now I’ve actually read this review that I’ve twigged the game is called Rogue WARRIOR. All this time I’ve seen headlines about it, I’ve been mentally substituting Rogue Trooper instead. Poor old Blue Guy.

I bought TROOPER in a Steam sale thing earlier this year and really enjoyed it. It did a good job of invoking the cold war meets world war two via the mind of a misogynistic sadist thing that I really liked from the comics. It’s not a brilliant game and I could happily have done without the on rails flying about bits but it was really entertaining and I played it all the way through in a couple of sittings.

I think taking a shot at the game’s graphics seems kinda cheap. Unless those screenshots you’ve posted are unrepresentative of most of the game, it looks fine. Good even. The comments about tearing, no anti-aliasing or whatever are valid and important, but come on, it hardly looks bad otherwise does it? I often read reviews (or opinions about) games that complain about their graphics, and I can’t see the problem. Maybe I have low standards or something, but those screenshots look fine. Five years out of date appears ok to me.

Granted, I haven’t played this game, but based on the reviews this is a classic example of a good idea being destroyed by the execution. I remember reading a review and thinking it sounded cool – a free-roaming third-person squad shooter, with your team left behind enemy lines and having to escape. I never thought it was going to be a masterpiece, but sounded like good fun – a high 70’s/mid 80’s game.

Now it’s become a laughing stock, and cast serious doubts over Rebellion’s ability to deliver on the promise of Aliens vs Predator.